There was a time, in the forgotten corners of the capital where stone rotted, there was a boy born into the slums.
His name was Alexander.
He was not born to greatness, nor to comfort. He was born to narrow streets, empty cupboards, and a future that never bothered to promise him anything bright. Yet, for a time, he was happy. He had a family, warm laughter in the evenings, hands that held his when the nights grew cold. Love existed there, even where wealth did not.
But happiness in the slums was fragile. It did not last.
On the other side of the kingdom, beyond the walls and marble halls, lived a girl born into everything Alexander lacked. Her name was Tia, a princess wrapped in silk and expectation, raised beneath chandeliers instead of collapsing roofs. Where Alexander learned hunger, she learned duty. Where he feared tomorrow, she was born to inherit it.
Their worlds were never meant to touch.
One was shaped by loss and survival, the other by luxury and quiet loneliness. They breathed the same air, lived under the same sky, yet existed as if separated by centuries.
And yet-
Fate has a way of wandering into places it does not belong.
It found Alexander in an alley of cold stone and bloodied ribs.
And it came wearing an old, oversized cloak.
-----
Tia had spent her entire life looking out from behind walls.
The castle was beautiful, marble corridors washed in sunlight, gardens trimmed into perfection, balconies that overlooked the kingdom like a painting meant only to be admired from afar. But beauty could still be a cage.
Her parents, King Charles and Queen Florintina, called it protection.
The outside is dangerous, they said, cruel, unforgiving.
They spoke of thieves and sickness, of filth and unrest, of a world unfit for a princess's eyes. And so the gates remained closed, and so did her path beyond them.
Tia obayed, she always had.
Yet curiosity still struck.
From her windows, she watched the kingdom breathe. Smoke rising from chimneys. Bells ringing in distant streets. People moving freely through spaces she was never allowed to walk. She wondered what laughter sounded like without etiquette, what kindness looked like without ceremony, what it meant to live a life that was not planned before it even began.
At night, when the castle slept and the guards grew careless in their certainty that she would never dare, the questions grew louder.
What if the world was more than what they feared?
What if it was more than what she had been told?
It wasn't rebellion that drove her beyond the walls.
It was longing.
So she wrapped herself in an old cloak, hid the silk and jewels that marked her as royal, and stepped into a version of the kingdom she had only ever seen from above. Each step beyond the gate felt like crossing an invisible line, one drawn by enforced by fear.
She told herself it would only be for a moment.
Just a glimpse.
Just enough to understand.
She did not know she was walking toward a boy with bruises burning across his ribs.
She did not know the alley would change her forever.
She only knew that for the first time in her life, she was choosing the world for herself.